Abstract

Generating high-resolution, photo-realistic images has been a long-standing goal in machine learning. Recently, Nguyen et al. (2016) showed one interesting way to synthesize novel images by performing gradient ascent in the latent space of a generator network to maximize the activations of one or multiple neurons in a separate classifier network. In this paper we extend this method by introducing an additional prior on the latent code, improving both sample quality and sample diversity, leading to a state-of-the-art generative model that produces high quality images at higher resolutions (227×227) than previous generative models, and does so for all 1000 ImageNet categories. In addition, we provide a unified probabilistic interpretation of related activation maximization methods and call the general class of models “Plug and Play Generative Networks”. PPGNs are composed of 1) a generator network G that is capable of drawing a wide range of image types and 2) a replaceable “condition” network C that tells the generator what to draw. We demonstrate the generation of images conditioned on a class (when C is an ImageNet or MIT Places classification network) and also conditioned on a caption (when C is an image captioning network). Our method also improves the state of the art of Multifaceted Feature Visualization, which generates the set of synthetic inputs that activate a neuron in order to better understand how deep neural networks operate. Finally, we show that our model performs reasonably well at the task of image inpainting. While image models are used in this paper, the approach is modality-agnostic and can be applied to many types of data.

Jeff Clune is the Loy and Edith Harris Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Wyoming and a Senior Research Manager and founding member of Uber AI Labs, which was formed after Uber acquired the startup Geometric Intelligence. Jeff focuses on robotics and training neural networks via deep learning and deep reinforcement learning. He has also researched open questions in evolutionary biology using computational models of evolution, including studying the evolutionary origins of modularity, hierarchy, and evolvability. Prior to becoming a professor, he was a Research Scientist at Cornell University, received a PhD in computer science and an MA in philosophy from Michigan State University, and received a BA in philosophy from the University of Michigan. More about Jeff’s research can be found at JeffClune.com